Richardson/Spens results

[Mike Truran]

a ringing phone will distract everyone else in the room.

Hardly a hanging offence, surely? As John says, there are many equally (and indeed more) annoying habits that chess players indulge in - eating crisps, sneezing, coughing, being smelly, wearing tatty clothes, picking their noses ......

I can't help feeling that all sense of proportionality has got lost somewhere along the line. Cheating? - zero tolerance. Distracting other people? - chess activity would come to a grinding halt if we started defaulting everybody who annoyed us.

I've always liked this clip from Not the Nine O'Clock News:

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